Fic: Grace - Chapter 15 (part 2)
Title: Grace - Chapter 15 (part 2)
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
“So,” Jon says, “so I have six salmon and avocados, eight teriyaki chickens and three tuna rolls.”
“Sushi?” Loretta asks, and she leans over the table, sticks a hand into a plastic bag, and comes out with two clear, plastic boxes.
Jon nods from across the room, beer in one hand, Playstation control in the other. Katy’s on the floor beside him, moving frantically in time with the pink Mario kart that zooms around the track on screen.
I’m collapsed in the wooden chair that sits beside the table. That conversation with my mother, it worked as a vacuum, it’s left me here so fucking tired, so fucking emotionally drained that I can’t even form the energy to lift my head off the table.
“Brendon,” Loretta says, “Brendon, what do you want?”
“I’m not hungry.”
I can feel Loretta’s fingers in my hair, can feel them brush my forehead through my fringe. “I thought we discussed this like, two hours ago. Need food to function, sweetie.”
“I ate before.”
“Yeah, but you sure as hell ain’t functioning.”
My head lifts just enough so that I can stare her in the eye, her eyebrows are up past her hairline, and her lips are thin and pressed together so tight that I half-expect her to have diamonds instead of teeth the next time she speaks.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure,” she says, and everything about her face implies a general displeasure. Nobody can portray unimpressed like Loretta can.
In the distance, Katy lets out a high-pitched squeal, and Jon yells out happily. Beneath that, beneath them, the default music plays on the game.
Everything right now, it’s so generic and my mother’s unhappiness, it’s spread over me like the plague.
“Brendon,” Loretta says, and she brushes my fringe away from my eyes, places a hand on either side of my face, on both my cheeks, and presses her lips to my forehead. “Brendon,” she says, “you haven’t been yourself, and I don’t think you’re fine.”
I slip out of her grasp, lay my head back onto the table and murmur something unintelligible. Loretta sighs, and I can feel her body tense beside me. She kneels on the floor, leans down next to me so that her head rests on the table beside mine.
“Jon told me that you called your mother.”
My eyes slam shut, and my fingers clench on the tabletop. “How the fuck would Jon know that?”
“How the fuck does Jon know anything? He’s the fifth Charmed sister, I thought we established that a few years ago.”
I stifle a snort, and Loretta, her fingers tap against the table legs. “But just, with your mother…you’ve been out of it the last few days, and I just want to…you don’t have to say anything, Brendon. I’d sure as fuck like you too, but I’m not gonna force you, and I’m not gonna bitch at you and I’m not gonna yell.”
Loretta, she takes a deep breath, in through the nose and out through her gently parted lips. I can hear her necklace dangle against the tabletop, can feel her breath against my neck, her fingers against my back. “I just want you to know that if you need it, then I’m here.”
And this, it hits me like a bus to the chest, like a plane to the ocean, like a nuclear bomb to Japan. This, Loretta, Jon, Ryan, Catherine, I need these people, and fuck, it’s awful, and I don’t want to need them, but I do. I need, I want, and I…I love, even if it’s hard, even if I’m not all that good at it.
“Loretta,” I mumble, “Loretta, I love you.” And maybe I’ve never, ever said that before. Not to anyone. Not seriously. “I love you.”
Her eyes don’t widen, and her face, her body, it doesn’t flinch. She just leans over gently, runs a hand through my hair and kisses me on the forehead. “I love you too.”
*
The thing about realizing that you need people in your life, the thing about it is that you suddenly have the irrepressible urge to see them, to talk to them, to not be mad at them anymore (even when what they do, what they say cuts you up so much inside, that your internal organs look like spliced meat).
The thing about realizing that I needed these people, well, it leads me to the Happier Days rehab clinic, not too far out of town. It leads me to Catherine.
“So,” I say, and it’s times like these, moments like these, in which I really, really wish I smoked. A cigarette between my fingers, between my lips, it would give me time to pause, seconds to actually fucking think about what I’m going to say. “How about you? You unhappy too?”
“Brendon,” Catherine says, and her forehead is furrowed, her grin giving her away, “Brendon, I’m in fucking rehab.”
My face falls, not that it was exactly ‘up’ to begin with, but I can feel my mouth at my ankles, my eyes at my kneecaps. “So, unhappy?”
Catherine laughs, but there’s a bitterness in there that rattles through my skull. “Nah, just fucked up.”
She presses shaky hands to the table, and then her forehead to her hands. All I can see is this never-ending stream of dyed-blonde hair, dark roots that sprout from the earthy recesses of her too-soft-skull. Catherine, she’s so Catherine. “Oh, Brendon,” she whispers, and her breath, if I could see it, I’m sure it would leave a white cloud on the plastic table. “It all went wrong somewhere.”
“To say it ‘went wrong’ would imply that it was right at some point.” And I never really thought of myself as a negative person, but with mum and with Ryan and with Catherine, the day, it’s just been too long.
The walls here are paper-white, ghost-white, egg-white. This whole place is more bland than my sixth-grade girlfriend, and my voice, if I talk any louder, it echoes around the hollow insides of the room. There’s a large picture frame on the left wall that says, “No Drugs are Good Drugs.” Another one on the far right which says, “You Are Never So Sick That You Can’t Get Better.”
The font on both images is all different sizes and brightly coloured and it hurts my eyes to look at them. This whole clinic hurts my heart and my head, and it’s so un-Catherine that it must eat her alive just being here.
“This place kind of disgusts me,” I say, and Catherine laughs, chuckles loud enough that the sound echoes around my skull.
“Try being here for two and a half months.”
I raise my forehead, and force a sharp intake of breath. “When do they let you out?”
“Uh,” she whispers, and she has a tag on her wrist. Her eyes flick down, and she stares back at me with a face so pale that it damn-near camouflages with the walls. “Twenty-one days.”
“Not so long,” I say, and Catherine shrugs, leans her head back down on the table, and this pose, it mirrors me yesterday. Mirrors me and Loretta.
“Ryan’s been visiting me,” she whispers, and her eyes peek up at me from beneath her fringe.
My heart stops in my chest, and I wish it didn’t, because right now I don’t want to think about him, this, it should be about Catherine. “What?”
“Ryan Ross,” she says again. “He’s quite lovely.”
“Why’s he been visiting you?”
She crinkles her forehead, purses her lips and runs a hand through her hair. “I think he might miss you.”
“Then he should see me,” I reply in slight disbelief. “He holds all the cards at the moment.”
Catherine shrugs. “I dunno. I don’t pretend to know why people do shit.”
My head tries to wrap itself around all this, but all I can think to say is, “Do you know where he’s staying?”
“Yes,” she says, and she nods her head quickly, curtly. She’s sitting up properly now, I can see her bloodshot eyes and her gaunt face.
“Are you going to tell me?” I ask, and I gesture with my hands, roll my fingers around in tiny imitation circles.
She thinks for a second, before smiling and rolling her eyes to the plaster ceiling. “No.”
I sigh, but I don’t press it. Instead I close my eyes tight and try not to slam my head onto the table, try not to fucking cry. I’m too tired, and Catherine, I can feel her staring at me with wide, desperate eyes.
“I think you hate me, Brendon.” And the way she says it is so raw, so distracted that I almost pass it off as nothing.
“What?”
“I think you hate me. I think you think I’m stupid, that I can’t look after myself, that I can’t…” She’s struggling, her fists bang on the table, and a nurse in the corner casts us a wary look. “You think I can’t do stuff, you hate me.”
“Jesus Christ.” Catherine, she’s tugging at her wrists, at her shirt, at her hair, she’s crying, and this, this is the sociopath I’ve always known, this is Catherine, and this is why I left Las Vegas. “Stop.”
I grab her wrists too tight from across the table, and she struggles adamantly against me, the nurse is coming over to help, but I manage to free a hand and wave her off. A “we’re fine,” is forced from my lips.
“Do you want to know why I hated you?”
Catherine won’t make eye-contact, she’s still struggling against me, and I move around the table so I can crush her whole body into my arms. Her tears, they soak into my shoulder and they burn like acid.
“You were supposed to be the older one.”
“What?”
“You were supposed to be the mentor; you were supposed to be my big sister.” And my voice rips itself from my chest, from that deep trove in my heart. “It was always me, always me having to look after you, and you say I didn’t think you could look after yourself, and Catherine, it was because you couldn’t.”
“I could,” Catherine whispers into my shoulder, “I could.”
“You tried, and then I had to come pick you up three years later and you’d been raped and you were trashed and, Catherine, you need help, you need supervision, you need parents or a boyfriend or something.”
Catherine’s sobs are harder, they tear at my head and tug at my bleeding heart, and Christ, I’ve missed her, but I haven’t missed this.
“I love you,” I whisper into her ear, and I don’t mean it in the same way that I meant it when I said it to Loretta, but the part of me that still remembers the twelve-year-old girl who taught me how to blow bubbles, that part of me is so sincere that my heart aches as her blunt fingers clutch at my arms.
Catherine doesn’t reply straight away, but her crying, it’s earth-shattering, her tear-duct volcanoes set to explode again. “I love you,” she says, and I think it’s the same for her, she doesn’t love me, but she loves seven-year-old me, she loves eight-year-old me, nine-year-old me. She loves the baby brother that she could teach and look after and love unconditionally with the knowledge that I’d stare up at her with wide eyes and open-heart no matter what she did or said.
“Good,” I say, “good.” And I clutch her to me tighter, let my arms fold around her frail body, and her own arms still clasp onto my biceps.
“Yeah,” she says, “thank you.” And later, when the nurses come round to clear me out, to pry me off her coz hey, visiting hours are over, later Catherine will stare at me with wide eyes and a shaky smile.
“Goodbye, Brendon,” she says.
“G’bye,” I reply, and I close the door behind me.
That night she commits suicide in her room.
She drowns herself in the sink.
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
“So,” Jon says, “so I have six salmon and avocados, eight teriyaki chickens and three tuna rolls.”
“Sushi?” Loretta asks, and she leans over the table, sticks a hand into a plastic bag, and comes out with two clear, plastic boxes.
Jon nods from across the room, beer in one hand, Playstation control in the other. Katy’s on the floor beside him, moving frantically in time with the pink Mario kart that zooms around the track on screen.
I’m collapsed in the wooden chair that sits beside the table. That conversation with my mother, it worked as a vacuum, it’s left me here so fucking tired, so fucking emotionally drained that I can’t even form the energy to lift my head off the table.
“Brendon,” Loretta says, “Brendon, what do you want?”
“I’m not hungry.”
I can feel Loretta’s fingers in my hair, can feel them brush my forehead through my fringe. “I thought we discussed this like, two hours ago. Need food to function, sweetie.”
“I ate before.”
“Yeah, but you sure as hell ain’t functioning.”
My head lifts just enough so that I can stare her in the eye, her eyebrows are up past her hairline, and her lips are thin and pressed together so tight that I half-expect her to have diamonds instead of teeth the next time she speaks.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure,” she says, and everything about her face implies a general displeasure. Nobody can portray unimpressed like Loretta can.
In the distance, Katy lets out a high-pitched squeal, and Jon yells out happily. Beneath that, beneath them, the default music plays on the game.
Everything right now, it’s so generic and my mother’s unhappiness, it’s spread over me like the plague.
“Brendon,” Loretta says, and she brushes my fringe away from my eyes, places a hand on either side of my face, on both my cheeks, and presses her lips to my forehead. “Brendon,” she says, “you haven’t been yourself, and I don’t think you’re fine.”
I slip out of her grasp, lay my head back onto the table and murmur something unintelligible. Loretta sighs, and I can feel her body tense beside me. She kneels on the floor, leans down next to me so that her head rests on the table beside mine.
“Jon told me that you called your mother.”
My eyes slam shut, and my fingers clench on the tabletop. “How the fuck would Jon know that?”
“How the fuck does Jon know anything? He’s the fifth Charmed sister, I thought we established that a few years ago.”
I stifle a snort, and Loretta, her fingers tap against the table legs. “But just, with your mother…you’ve been out of it the last few days, and I just want to…you don’t have to say anything, Brendon. I’d sure as fuck like you too, but I’m not gonna force you, and I’m not gonna bitch at you and I’m not gonna yell.”
Loretta, she takes a deep breath, in through the nose and out through her gently parted lips. I can hear her necklace dangle against the tabletop, can feel her breath against my neck, her fingers against my back. “I just want you to know that if you need it, then I’m here.”
And this, it hits me like a bus to the chest, like a plane to the ocean, like a nuclear bomb to Japan. This, Loretta, Jon, Ryan, Catherine, I need these people, and fuck, it’s awful, and I don’t want to need them, but I do. I need, I want, and I…I love, even if it’s hard, even if I’m not all that good at it.
“Loretta,” I mumble, “Loretta, I love you.” And maybe I’ve never, ever said that before. Not to anyone. Not seriously. “I love you.”
Her eyes don’t widen, and her face, her body, it doesn’t flinch. She just leans over gently, runs a hand through my hair and kisses me on the forehead. “I love you too.”
*
The thing about realizing that you need people in your life, the thing about it is that you suddenly have the irrepressible urge to see them, to talk to them, to not be mad at them anymore (even when what they do, what they say cuts you up so much inside, that your internal organs look like spliced meat).
The thing about realizing that I needed these people, well, it leads me to the Happier Days rehab clinic, not too far out of town. It leads me to Catherine.
“So,” I say, and it’s times like these, moments like these, in which I really, really wish I smoked. A cigarette between my fingers, between my lips, it would give me time to pause, seconds to actually fucking think about what I’m going to say. “How about you? You unhappy too?”
“Brendon,” Catherine says, and her forehead is furrowed, her grin giving her away, “Brendon, I’m in fucking rehab.”
My face falls, not that it was exactly ‘up’ to begin with, but I can feel my mouth at my ankles, my eyes at my kneecaps. “So, unhappy?”
Catherine laughs, but there’s a bitterness in there that rattles through my skull. “Nah, just fucked up.”
She presses shaky hands to the table, and then her forehead to her hands. All I can see is this never-ending stream of dyed-blonde hair, dark roots that sprout from the earthy recesses of her too-soft-skull. Catherine, she’s so Catherine. “Oh, Brendon,” she whispers, and her breath, if I could see it, I’m sure it would leave a white cloud on the plastic table. “It all went wrong somewhere.”
“To say it ‘went wrong’ would imply that it was right at some point.” And I never really thought of myself as a negative person, but with mum and with Ryan and with Catherine, the day, it’s just been too long.
The walls here are paper-white, ghost-white, egg-white. This whole place is more bland than my sixth-grade girlfriend, and my voice, if I talk any louder, it echoes around the hollow insides of the room. There’s a large picture frame on the left wall that says, “No Drugs are Good Drugs.” Another one on the far right which says, “You Are Never So Sick That You Can’t Get Better.”
The font on both images is all different sizes and brightly coloured and it hurts my eyes to look at them. This whole clinic hurts my heart and my head, and it’s so un-Catherine that it must eat her alive just being here.
“This place kind of disgusts me,” I say, and Catherine laughs, chuckles loud enough that the sound echoes around my skull.
“Try being here for two and a half months.”
I raise my forehead, and force a sharp intake of breath. “When do they let you out?”
“Uh,” she whispers, and she has a tag on her wrist. Her eyes flick down, and she stares back at me with a face so pale that it damn-near camouflages with the walls. “Twenty-one days.”
“Not so long,” I say, and Catherine shrugs, leans her head back down on the table, and this pose, it mirrors me yesterday. Mirrors me and Loretta.
“Ryan’s been visiting me,” she whispers, and her eyes peek up at me from beneath her fringe.
My heart stops in my chest, and I wish it didn’t, because right now I don’t want to think about him, this, it should be about Catherine. “What?”
“Ryan Ross,” she says again. “He’s quite lovely.”
“Why’s he been visiting you?”
She crinkles her forehead, purses her lips and runs a hand through her hair. “I think he might miss you.”
“Then he should see me,” I reply in slight disbelief. “He holds all the cards at the moment.”
Catherine shrugs. “I dunno. I don’t pretend to know why people do shit.”
My head tries to wrap itself around all this, but all I can think to say is, “Do you know where he’s staying?”
“Yes,” she says, and she nods her head quickly, curtly. She’s sitting up properly now, I can see her bloodshot eyes and her gaunt face.
“Are you going to tell me?” I ask, and I gesture with my hands, roll my fingers around in tiny imitation circles.
She thinks for a second, before smiling and rolling her eyes to the plaster ceiling. “No.”
I sigh, but I don’t press it. Instead I close my eyes tight and try not to slam my head onto the table, try not to fucking cry. I’m too tired, and Catherine, I can feel her staring at me with wide, desperate eyes.
“I think you hate me, Brendon.” And the way she says it is so raw, so distracted that I almost pass it off as nothing.
“What?”
“I think you hate me. I think you think I’m stupid, that I can’t look after myself, that I can’t…” She’s struggling, her fists bang on the table, and a nurse in the corner casts us a wary look. “You think I can’t do stuff, you hate me.”
“Jesus Christ.” Catherine, she’s tugging at her wrists, at her shirt, at her hair, she’s crying, and this, this is the sociopath I’ve always known, this is Catherine, and this is why I left Las Vegas. “Stop.”
I grab her wrists too tight from across the table, and she struggles adamantly against me, the nurse is coming over to help, but I manage to free a hand and wave her off. A “we’re fine,” is forced from my lips.
“Do you want to know why I hated you?”
Catherine won’t make eye-contact, she’s still struggling against me, and I move around the table so I can crush her whole body into my arms. Her tears, they soak into my shoulder and they burn like acid.
“You were supposed to be the older one.”
“What?”
“You were supposed to be the mentor; you were supposed to be my big sister.” And my voice rips itself from my chest, from that deep trove in my heart. “It was always me, always me having to look after you, and you say I didn’t think you could look after yourself, and Catherine, it was because you couldn’t.”
“I could,” Catherine whispers into my shoulder, “I could.”
“You tried, and then I had to come pick you up three years later and you’d been raped and you were trashed and, Catherine, you need help, you need supervision, you need parents or a boyfriend or something.”
Catherine’s sobs are harder, they tear at my head and tug at my bleeding heart, and Christ, I’ve missed her, but I haven’t missed this.
“I love you,” I whisper into her ear, and I don’t mean it in the same way that I meant it when I said it to Loretta, but the part of me that still remembers the twelve-year-old girl who taught me how to blow bubbles, that part of me is so sincere that my heart aches as her blunt fingers clutch at my arms.
Catherine doesn’t reply straight away, but her crying, it’s earth-shattering, her tear-duct volcanoes set to explode again. “I love you,” she says, and I think it’s the same for her, she doesn’t love me, but she loves seven-year-old me, she loves eight-year-old me, nine-year-old me. She loves the baby brother that she could teach and look after and love unconditionally with the knowledge that I’d stare up at her with wide eyes and open-heart no matter what she did or said.
“Good,” I say, “good.” And I clutch her to me tighter, let my arms fold around her frail body, and her own arms still clasp onto my biceps.
“Yeah,” she says, “thank you.” And later, when the nurses come round to clear me out, to pry me off her coz hey, visiting hours are over, later Catherine will stare at me with wide eyes and a shaky smile.
“Goodbye, Brendon,” she says.
“G’bye,” I reply, and I close the door behind me.
That night she commits suicide in her room.
She drowns herself in the sink.